“ ‘Speak to me no more of love, as you would save your soul alive. In sin and sorrow my lot is fixed forever. Beware how you court me here. I strive to save you. We are not all alike. I am not as these: I have mercy: I would deliver you: but these are stronger than I. The adversary has called me from my mournful dreams to work his will. They will have you—they will have you. Know you who they are?’
“I spoke again, I know not what. ‘Beware—once more beware,’ said she softly. ‘See you not that these are in torment and hatred? You know what they are. If you regard not my counsel you will be among them, and of them in eternity. You are in mortal peril—beware.’
“Again, in wayward madness, I spoke—
“ ‘The time draws nigh,’ said she, while death-paleness overspread her cheeks. ‘I foresaw this. I dreaded it. The time draws nigh—my mission will be ended. They will let me go to my quiet; but you they will possess and keep in the bondage of hell—in hatred and agony forever and ever. It is too late now. You have spoken the word. I am going hence, where you will see me no more.’
“As she thus spoke, a cloudy indistinctness overspread the pale beautiful vision, and she began slowly and mournfully to recede from me. Stung with horror and agony at the sight, I cast myself before the fading form.
“ ‘Stay, stay, beautiful, beloved illusion,’ I said; ‘leave me not, oh, leave me not alone—I can love none other—I am your slave, your worshipper—I am yours forever—God be my witness.’
“As I ended the sentence, a yelling crash like the roar of ten thousand gigantic bells stunned my ears—total darkness swallowed every object, and my senses forsook me.
“I was found in the morning by the sexton of ⸻, senseless, bruised, and covered with blood and foam, lying in the great aisles of that building. Since then I have been, you will say, mad—I say, the sport of other souls than my own—a blind, desperate instrument of hell, wending onward to an eternal doom which no imaginable power can avert. This consciousness of inevitable fate has been my companion ever since then, and it has taught me to despise opinion, virtue, vice—to trample on religion, and to laugh at punishment.
“Satan, whose I am, had chosen me for himself, to do his work even from the first. I am one with him, and he with me; and when I die, will merge forever into that dark mind. Think you, then, I care whether death come today, or tomorrow, or the next day? It must arrive soon; and then—
“Now, father, I have confessed enough, and you are welcome to tell my shrift to all the world. Absolve me now; and if you send me to heaven, I’ll give you credit for a wonder-worker when we meet.”
So saying, he laughed loud and bitterly.
He is to die tomorrow in the Place of St. Mark. They are building the scaffold. All are anxious to see the celebrated bravo and bandit.
They say that he has killed more than two hundred men in various broils and actions with his own hand. The caitiff mob of Venice admires the gigantic ruffian.
“Spalatro,” say they, “was a great man—a grand robber—a tremendous bravo. There will not soon again be such another dagger in Venice.”
It is over—the axe has fallen—the wretched sinner has passed from the world he so much abused. He spoke to the people from the scaffold, but all in mockery and jibes. The giddy crowd applauded him. When he had done speaking, and before the executioner was ready, of a sudden, and for the last time, a fit seized him; he cried out with a loud voice. The devil cast him down, and tore him. While he lay struggling on the planks the signal was made, and at two blows the head was severed from the body.
Thus ends the narrative of honest Giacamo. Whether or not he believed the tale I cannot tell: he certainly wrote it carefully out from end to end in his fair tall hand. For myself, I have little doubt that the story contains a pretty accurate detail of the successive attacks of delirium tremens which the drunken excesses of the wretch Spalatro were calculated to induce; for it is but giving the devil his due to admit, that it is not his usual practice to have young men to supper with a view to get off his daughters. I confess, too, that, under all the circumstances, I am strongly inclined to think that “the old man” who figures in the foregoing narrative, (and whom I take to be identical with the old boy,) ought to have consummated his persecution of the poor highwayman by an action for breach of promise of marriage, which would certainly lie in such a case. Perhaps, however, the devil showed his good sense in preferring his own fireside to venturing into our courts of law for a remedy. However, my dear Harry, joke as we may, it is not easy, no nor possible, altogether to extract from the mind its inborn affection for the marvellous. Philosophy does but teach us the extent of our ignorance (I think I saw that somewhere or other before, but no matter). Do the dead return from the grave? Do strange influences reveal to mortal eye the shadowy vistas of futurity? Can demoniac agencies possess the body as of old, and blast the mind? What are these things that we call spectral illusions, dreams, madness? All around us is darkness and uncertainty. To what thing shall we say I understand thee? All is doubt—all is mystery; in short, in the words of
